The Last Bipartisan

WHEN I first encountered Ron Wyden in 1974, he was setting up the Oregon outpost of the Gray Panthers, a lobby group founded by the liberal activist Maggie Kuhn with a broad agenda but an emphasis on empowering the elderly. Wyden, who was 25, seemed improbably boyish to be a champion of senior citizens. But he radiated a winning, wonky exuberance. He was clearly bound for a life in politics. He won an insurgent campaign for a House seat in 1980, graduated to the Senate in 1996 — and now, at age 63, has spent almost exactly half his life on Capitol Hill.

If the name rings a bell, it’s probably because Senator Wyden — without really deserving it — has become a bumper sticker in the Republican presidential campaign. Wyden, an Obama Democrat, co-authored a Medicare reform proposal with Paul Ryan last year, a precursor to the Ryan budget plan that Democrats have pilloried as a heartless effort to throw grandma and grandpa off the train. When Romney and Ryan refer to their Medicare thinking as “bipartisan,” as they do ceaselessly, they mean Ron Wyden. In truth, Wyden never subscribed to the most draconian aspects of the Ryan blueprint, but the fact that the Romney-Ryan ticket uses his name as cover has not endeared Wyden to his own party. Charles Pope, the Washington correspondent for Wyden’s hometown paper, The Oregonian, began a thoughtful analysis of the senator’s predicament this way: “Trail blazer or traitor?”

We’ll get back to Medicare in a moment, but let’s linger a bit on what this episode tells us about the decline of the honorable craft of lawmaking.

Back in the day, when Wyden was young and Congress was held in slightly higher esteem, it was common and respectable for lawmakers who disagreed about most things to meet up on a patch of common ground. Ted Kennedy, the iconic liberal, and Orrin Hatch, an uberconservative, often joined forces to expand health care for children or to protect the rights of the disabled. John McCain — an earlier, less cynical version of John McCain — was an aisle-crosser of the first order on issues like immigration. A willingness to forge such alliances used to be taken as evidence that one put the country’s business above party conformity. It let Republicans show they had a heart and Democrats show they could be hardheaded. Nobody embraced this tradition more enthusiastically than Ron Wyden.

What happened? For one thing, the Newt Gingrich/Tom DeLay/Karl Rove/Eric Cantor school of constant, never-give-an-inch partisan combat happened. The Tea Party happened, purging moderates and putting the fear of compromise into the Orrin Hatches. The permanent re-election campaign happened: members of Congress now regard Capitol Hill as a place they drop by on breaks from fund-raising and town meetings, so that instead of forging constructive relationships, Congress is often about striking poses. And our broader political culture became a cluster of echo chambers. “I never envisioned a day,” Wyden told me recently, “when, from an ideological standpoint, people would have their own television stations” — Fox for the right, MSNBC for the left, news that keeps us apart.

Nowadays, Wyden is like the Amur tiger or the ivory-billed woodpecker — if not the last of his breed, at best a very endangered species. Still, he persists in cornering colleagues who would disagree with him 95 percent of the time — Judd Gregg, Dan Coats, Darrell Issa, Marco Rubio, Scott Brown, Paul Ryan — and engaging them on the 5 percent where they might get something done. On tax reform, copyright protection, Internet freedom, education and especially health care, Wyden has found unlikely partners from the other side. These joint ventures rarely get adopted wholesale, but interesting elements find their way into the debate, and into the law. A fairly typical example: Wyden and Brown, the Massachusetts Tea Party favorite, designed an amendment to the Affordable Care Act that lets states opt out if they can provide equivalent benefits and quality of care some other way. After much Democratic harrumphing, President Obama bought it. (Coming as he does from a relatively progressive and inventive state, Wyden is more open than many Democrats to treating the states as laboratories for new ideas, as long as the federal government enforces minimum standards.)

I once asked a Wyden aide whether the senator ever showed signs of despair at the increasingly toxic climate. “You know,” the aide replied, “I’ve been trying to figure the guy out for about six years now and I honestly think that while the stuff that goes on here makes the rest of us tired, angry and cynical, it just makes him that much more determined to find a way to fix it. Seriously, after taking a three-year beating trying to push bipartisan health reform, he walks into my office and says, ‘Great, now we’re going to do bipartisan tax reform.’ I admire the hell out of him for it, but sometimes I want to throw things at him.”

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Bill KellerCredit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

When I reached him in Oregon the other day, Wyden was preparing to fly up to Alaska to see if he and Lisa Murkowski, a drill-baby-drill Republican senator, could work through the gridlock on energy policy.

For evidence that legislative odd-coupling can be a thankless exercise, let’s return to Wyden’s attempt to tackle Medicare.

Last year Wyden and Ryan held a news conference to release their plan. It would leave Medicare intact for anyone 55 and over, but give the next wave of retirees a menu of options including traditional Medicare and private insurance plans that would compete in local auctions. (The system resembles the insurance exchanges envisioned in the Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare.) By introducing a measure of choice and competition Wyden hoped to prod health care providers toward more efficient practices and reap savings that could be used to ensure the long-term survival of Medicare.

The Ryan-Wyden proposal tasked the federal government to enforce basic protections for the vulnerable. It made Medicare more progressive, by requiring that the wealthy pay higher premiums. But, as Wyden says, the plan “put Medicare on a budget,” allowed to grow only 1 percent faster than G.D.P. unless Congress intervened.

Many in his own party saw this as sacrilege, or at least a slippery slope. Liberals complained that the plan, by diverting some beneficiaries into private plans, would weaken Medicare’s power to bargain for lower prices. Wyden’s response: “Folks, 10,000 people are going to turn 65 every day for the next 20 years. Those of us who care about protecting the Medicare guarantee, we’re going to have to find a way to make some tough decisions.”

When Ryan drafted the budget that has become the Republican Party’s manifesto, he moved the goal posts. The Republican plan, unlike Ryan-Wyden, slashes Medicaid for the poor. By repealing Obamacare, it discards that law’s attempts to rein in health care costs, which Wyden rightly says are insufficient but represent a start. The budget bill was in these essential ways a repudiation of the Ryan-Wyden exercise in bipartisanship. The Oregon senator decried them and voted against them. But Wyden’s reward for collaborating with Ryan is that the Republicans treat him as a trophy and his own party treats him as a patsy. (The Gray Panthers aren’t very happy with him either.)

Wyden has already told Ryan he hopes to work with him again, and he declines to say an unkind word about the vice-presidential hopeful, which is pretty generous given the plausible suspicion that Ryan just wanted him along for window dressing.

“Bipartisanship is not for the fainthearted,” says Wyden, who seems to be disillusion-proof.

But this episode may well shrink the already diminished pool of lawmakers who are willing to buck party orthodoxy, and that is sad. Whatever the outcome in November, a president and Congress will return to Planet Washington in desperate need of some solutions — not least on Medicare. They will need all the Ron Wydens they can get.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 27, 2012, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: The Last Bipartisan. Today's Paper|Subscribe